Recording Vocals for Red Hands
For one of the tracks I was mixing for a client, I noticed the vocals were not too great pitch wise throughout. I took it upon myself to re-record the vocals and add them in to the mix.
The song was a cover of a Walk Off the Earth song called 'Red Hands' that I recorded during my A-Levels. The client I was working for was my old A-Level music technology teacher and was okay with me adding to the track. The journal entry for the mix is available here for more information on that.
I asked my friend Adam Clarke if he could sing the vocals for me in the track. He said he would be happy to and was glad because he already knew that track which made it a lot easier.
I booked the studio session for Thursday 23rd March 2017 for 2 hours (16:00-18:00). This gave me plenty of time to get the track down and get enough takes to fill the gaps I needed filling.
Before heading into the studio I took the track from logic into pro tools so that I could record onto it in the studio. Doing this before hand would definitely save time in the studio and leave more room for recording.
Thursday 23rd March 2017
We arrioved at the studio at 16:00 and set up a microphone and headphone mix for Adam to use.
I decided to use the Shure SM7b for the vocals as it is a good microphone for vocals as generally accepted by the sound engineering community.
After loading my track up in the control room I noticed that the I/O on pro tools wasn't working and nothing was going in or out. We tried to fix the issue, and spent over an hour trying to resolve this problem with no luck. We called the technicians in to see if they could help and they were also stumped. We decided that it would be best to leave it and come back another day as there was very little time left of the session at that point and we wouldn't be able to get much done.
I re-booked the studio for the following week at the same time (Thursday 30th March from 16:00 -18:00)
Thursday 30th March 2017
We arrived at the studio for the second time with the hopes that this time the session would run smoothly. We were lucky this time and everything went to plan. We set up the studio the same as before and recorded in multiple takes of the song to get everything done as best as possible. We tried recording each section at a time so that if the phrasing was off in some areas I could just replace it with another part, which worked out very well.
After the two hours, I had everything I needed and took the work off to finish the mix for my client.
Overall the studio time was not great as half of the tie I had booked for this task had been lost due to errors in the studio, which is very disappointing, but in the end it all worked out just fine and I got the recording I needed.
